


dance your little dance (til it makes me cry)

by maggierachael



Series: grade school games [2]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Connie Murphy (Narcos) - Freeform, Cory Brooke, Embarrassing Childhood Stories, F/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Season/Series 03, Steve Murphy (Narcos) - Freeform, and bad dancing, and so does david bowie, but not for long, cory finally has her boy back, javier peña doesn't know how to handle feelings, more self-indulgent fluff bullshit so ENJOY, only kinda briefly though, steve sees through their pining bullshit, they are enablers (as is the author), yes i'm giving cory her own tag for my own sake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22928116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: “This isn’t an order.” Cory’s voice was the exact opposite of flat. Bright and full of life. “This is a celebration.”“A celebration of what, exactly?”“Leave. Catching Escobar. Still being alive. I don’t know, take your pick.”Cory's got a thing for David Bowie. And embarrassing Javi.She's missed him.
Relationships: Javier Peña/Original Female Character(s)
Series: grade school games [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639453
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	1. too much spare change

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be strong for all it takes,  
> I'll cover your head till the bad stuff breaks  
> I'll dance my little dance till it makes you smile,  
> Shaking like this honey doing that -   
> Never let you down 
> 
> -David Bowie, "Never Let Me Down"

There was something special about a crowded bar that always made Cory feel at home. 

Maybe it was the fact that she’d grown up in Texas, and the habit of hanging out in loud places was built into her DNA, but she’d always been better able to relax when there was enough noise in a room to drown out the sound of a transformer explosion. Perhaps it was because said noise made it easier to drown out her own thoughts, but it worked for her either way. 

This particular bar in downtown Dallas was particularly loud, the sound of four separate televised football games mixing in with the clink of glasses and the dull roar of hordes of patrons gathered to drown the sorrows of their work week in Heineken. (She drank Stella, personally, but to each his own.) She hadn’t chosen it - God knows she hated downtown - but it was nice. Good beer, greasy food, and low enough lighting that she hadn’t had to worry too much about her lipstick being smudged when Javi introduced her to his partner and his wife, on leave from their government duties for the next week. Hazards of working eight hours a day around toddlers. 

To be fair, if she’d been given more warning, she would’ve spared poor Connie and Steve from having to look at her usual hippie schoolmarm clothes too. Javi had seen them more than any boyfriend or coworker ever had, but the least she wished she’d done was to not look like one of her kids’ art projects in front of new people. She had enough nice “being introduced to your best friend’s other acquaintances” outfits stuffed away in her closet at home, but when you’re friends with Javier Peña and he gives you three hours’ notice about arriving in Dallas from Bogotá and going out to dinner to celebrate being on leave, you just have to ditch the cardigan and tie your paint-stained hair up with a spare rubber band and do your best. 

Mercifully, her best seemed to be more than enough. Her dinner companions had only just landed in Dallas themselves, and she had to assure Steve and Connie multiple times that she didn’t mind sharing a table with their daughter Olivia, who got quite a kick out of playing with the fringe on the sleeve of her shirt. 

“I’m sitting next to this one,” she’d said, hitching a thumb towards Javi, who was busy eyeballing his own drink. “At least she’s got better table manners.” 

That had earned her a snort from Steve and Connie nearly choking on her drink, so she figured she could get along with Javi’s other friends just fine. 

And just fine it was. Steve wasted no time in filling in the gaps of her friend’s time in Columbia and bringing about every embarrassing story he could like a pigheaded little brother, and Cory couldn’t keep the shit-eating grin off her face when Javi’s face turned the same shade of red as the neon sign outside the bar. (She reminded herself to pester him for the bits Javi wouldn’t let him tell later.) It was nice, getting to hear what Colombia was like outside the grim descriptions Javi gave of the DEA offices over the phone. It ignited an itch under her skin, to get out of the same place she’d been living in her entire life and see the world. Maybe not Columbia, considering what Javi and Steve had been doing down there, but somewhere else. Prague, maybe. Or Paris. Maybe even Tokyo. The possibilities were endless...unlike her bank account, which was the entire reason she was still stuck in Dallas in the first place, while Javi was off in South America and all of her other friends had moved out of state years ago. 

The thought made her down the rest of her glass and immediately try to wave for another without looking suspicious. 

It wasn’t until after the third round of doing so that the conversation swung back around to her, and she had a feeling her face was probably a similar shade of red to Javi’s when Steve slapped an empty pint glass down on the table and looked up at her. 

“Nobody ever told me Javi actually had friends,” he said maybe a little too loudly, pointing a finger at her face. “You seem way too nice to be able to put up with him.” 

He sounded drunk enough that Javi only rolled his eyes, and Cory snorted. With Javi’s trademark stoicism and her habit of accidentally using her teacher voice on adults, the sentence wouldn’t have been too hard to believe had she not known otherwise. 

“Trust me, my bitchiness is a very well-kept secret,” she replied. “I’m like a snarky parasite. He’s never getting rid of me.” 

Javi scoffed into his drink. 

“You’re hardly a parasite.” 

In the low light of the bar, it was difficult to tell whether he was genuinely grumpy or just doing his best angry Burt Reynolds impression as per usual. Not that Cory had ever been one to avoid poking the bear when it came to her best friend, but she treaded carefully in front of his friends. No use embarrassing herself in front of them this early on. 

“Maybe.” She traced pattern in the condensation on the table as she spoke. “But I have seen you as a skinny, pimply high schooler. Sometimes I think you keep me around just to avoid that information getting out.” 

It was a joke, but she reached across the booth to squeeze her friend’s hand under the table anyway. The pause before he reacted was gut-wrenching - she could’ve been on a rollercoaster, the way her stomach dropped out. 

“You’ve known each other that long?” 

Thank God for Connie. 

Cory let out a breath to respond, ready at the gate with the story she’d told perhaps too many times, but Javi beat her to it, swirling his drink around in his glass as he spoke. 

“Longer, actually.” She could hear the cringe in his voice as he thought back to how awkward they’d both been, and something in her own chest tightened when she felt his return her small squeeze under the table. “We met in junior high.” 

“I chewed out some bitch that was picking on him,” she said proudly. “He’s been stuck with me ever since.” 

She heard a rare laugh spill out of her best friend - he was actually showing emotion in public, miracle of miracles - and the sound of his glass clinking back to the table. 

“I believe you also gave her a split lip.” 

Cory shrugged. 

“She deserved it.” 

Javi didn’t argue with that one. 

“And if I remember correctly, you also gave my boyfriend a black eye a few years later, so I think we’re even in that department.”

“Was that the one when you were a junior or a senior? They looked the same.” 

“I’m going to assume you’re _ not _ insulting my taste in guys with that. But it was junior year. Because you replaced him as my prom date.”

Steve’s eyebrows floated towards the ceiling like they just been filled with helium. 

“ _ He _ went to prom.” The surprise in his voice was about appropriate for the revelation Cory had just laid on him. “With you.” 

She nodded, the alcohol in her system spreading her mouth into a self-satisfied grin. 

“Corsage and everything,” she replied. “It was like some shit out of  _ Dynasty _ .” 

“My God.” 

Connie didn’t look quite as shocked as her husband, but the look of incredulity on their faces was satisfying enough that Cory didn’t feel the need to order another drink. If she hadn’t known him most of her life, she probably would’ve had the same reaction herself. 

“I’ll have to dig out the pictures. Truly awful.” She shot back the last of her beer, the heat created in her body the hops and her moderately embarrassing conversation now far overpowering the heat created by the bodies in the packed bar. “Last time I ever saw him in a proper suit, too.”

That one was a lie. She’d seen him in a tux one other time. Damn thing never left his truck. Never arrived at the altar it was supposed to be displayed on. Ended up in a garment bag in her basement while they watched  _ Happy Days  _ on her couch. Ended up dirty enough that she’d had to scrub tears and hard Texan dust out of it before they took it back to the vendor the next week. Or rather, she had, to spare her friend the embarrassment of having to return an unneeded suit. For sale, baby shoes, that kind of thing. 

But they didn’t talk about that. 

“Clearly you’ve never seen him at work.” 

Steve bubbled out a chuckle, and Cory bit the inside of her own cheek, her brain still half caught in the memory of that other suit. He’d been out of town when she’d made her little...emergency trip to see Javi, and she was surprised he’d never been told in the year and a half since. Little did he know. 

“Bet he doesn’t dance like an awkward teenager to David Bowie at work though.” 

She grinned, poking a sharp elbow into Javi’s ribcage even if it made her look thirteen again. (The fact that she still had acrylic paint on her cheek didn’t help her case too much.) He winced, and this time she could see through the grumpy exterior to the actual, genuine embarrassment underneath. She considered herself immensely talented at very few things, but getting under her best friend’s skin was certainly one of them. 

“I will let you call me awkward, but I draw the line at the "Starman" story,” he grumbled. 

“You don’t even like Bowie!” Cory’s eyes flashed before they turned back to Javi’s friends. “That’s his one fault.” 

Steve practically snorted. 

“The only one? You’re sure?”

“Maybe the mustache too.” Cory shrugged. “But there’s nothing I can do about that tragedy, so I settle for embarrassing him with that story.” 

“Which you are not going to tell.”

Javi looked like he wanted to elbow  _ her  _ in the ribs, but refrained. She stuck her tongue out at him, any sense of decorum flung out the window like a steak bone to a dog. 

“Kill joy.” 

“I will pay you everything in my wallet right now if you tell me that story, Corinne.”

Steve’s elbows were now on the table, a sign to any Southern girl with proper manners that he was, in fact, too invested in the situation to care about gentility.

She decided that she liked him. 

“I think Javi might actually denounce me before I get two syllables out, I’m afraid.”

She smiled despite the words coming out of her mouth, and the look on Javi’s face morphed from pessimism to something she couldn’t exactly identify. It freaked her out, not being able to read him. He might’ve been a differential calculus textbook to everybody else, but to her, he was her favorite novel, the one she’d read so many times that she knew almost every word off by heart, the binding softened and worn from years of repeated love. 

“I thought you said I was never getting rid of you,” he said. 

She craned her neck to look at him and shrugged, playing off the fact that her stomach had nearly dropped out from under her. 

“That was before I realized you’re the only person on the planet without a modicum of taste.” 

She smiled at him, and that unreadable expression shifted again. 

“Does that extend to my taste in friends?”

“Ha ha.” 

She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him again - she was Javi’s childhood friend, but she wasn’t an actual child. He was probably just grumpy and tired from their flight, but she couldn’t help feeling like there was something else rolling under the surface. Something insidious that she couldn’t name, no matter how much soul-searching she did. She didn’t like to see Javi worried - hell, she’d flown all the way to Colombia specifically for that reason - and even the possibility of it set her nerves on edge.

“You know what? I’ll do you one better, Steve.” 

Perhaps it was her years of teaching that had developed her impulse for immediate problem solving, but before Javi could mutter an “oh, lord”, she was wiggling out of the booth she crammed herself into, lucky she’d taken the outer seat when they’d arrived. She nearly tripped on Olivia’s high chair in the process, but soon enough she was standing, shoulders squared like she was about to call one of her many classes of fifth graders to attention in front of her group. At her height, she probably  _ looked  _ like a fifth grader, but with the level of alcohol they’d all drank, she thought, their motley crew didn’t seem too far off from one of her rowdier classes. 

“On your feet, Agent Peña.” 

She was just about sober enough to refrain from yanking on the sleeve of Javi’s DEA jacket to get him out of the booth with her, but her hand danced on the table near it anyway. Her twangy accent made her sound maybe a little too much like Joan Collins, but she rolled with it, forest green nails tapping the sticky, lacquered surface of the bar table. Steve cottoned on to what she was doing quickly enough, and Olivia was enraptured by the sound her bracelets made clinking on her wrists, but Javi looked unamused. And maybe a bit confused. 

“I’m officially on leave, Ms. Brooke.” His voice was flat, unreadable. It sounded dark. “No more taking orders.” 

“This isn’t an order.” Cory’s voice was the exact opposite. Bright and full of life. (And alcohol.) “This is a celebration.” 

“A celebration of what, exactly?”

Javi looked up at her through one dark, unconvinced eyebrow. She shrugged.

“Leave. Catching Escobar. Still being alive. I don’t know, take your pick.” 

“And celebrating involves me standing, because…?”

“Just do it, blockhead.” 

She placed a hand on her hip and waited, perfectly fine to let peer pressure do all the work of coaxing Javi to his feet. It was shockingly easy work, as it turns out, and Cory was beginning to like Steve and Connie more and more as they threw their chips in and made themselves part of her game. 

“You gonna leave her hanging, man?” 

Steve looked all too eager to harass his partner, and even Connie looked a little pleased as she leaned over to check on her daughter. 

“And he’s leaving her to pick up the tab too,” she muttered. “What a shame.” 

Cory stifled a laugh into her hand, partially at her new friends and partially at the hilariously intense scowl that crossed Javi’s face as Connie nonchalantly continued to fuss with Olivia. 

“Fucking menaces, all of you.”

Begrudgingly, he slid his way out of the small and cramped booth, making a point to stop and tickle Olivia under her chin before rising to stretch already tired muscles next to his friend. He was definitely markedly taller than Cory, who stared up at him a bit hazily, the amount of beers she’d had starting to go to her head just the tiniest bit. She squinted at him, then smiled, a satisfied feeling filling the pit of her stomach when he looked at her and raised an eyebrow. 

“Good,” she said. “Now don’t move.” 

She could hear the protest rising in Javi’s throat, and she didn’t stick around to hear him bitch at her for fucking with him. Instead, she chose to pad across the floor of the bar to a dark corner, tucked away from the patrons and very nearly forgotten about, surrounded by free-standing tables and littered with dusty remnants of peanut shells. (Welcome to Texas, where hygiene was only about a third-level priority.) She could feel the weight of three pairs of eyes on her back, but she only allowed the weight to push her forwards, towards the large hulking piece of equipment tucked away in the corner she was heading towards. 

The jukebox was like every other one still around in Texas - old and withering, the paint starting to peel off the outdated 50s model that could still play 78s if it wanted to. Its tracks had been replaced countless times, and Cory could feel the wear on the aging buttons as she brought it to life and flicked through her options. She prayed her desired outcome would be there, just like it was in every other shitty dive bar she’d been to since Javi left for Columbia, despite its age. (She’d been to a lot of dive bars.) She was tipsy enough that she was all in on making a risky decision, and the feel of the machine’s history under her fingers only boosted the confidence running rampant in her veins.

Despite nearly missing it through her smudged glasses, the holy grail she was thinking of was definitely there, and she slid the spare change from her pocket in with practiced elegance before making a mad dash from the machine back to the table, with speed that could only suggest she’d done this kind of thing countless times before. She had about fifteen seconds before the jukebox was sure to piss off a lot of masculine bar patrons, and she couldn’t waste any of it. 

Before he could sputter out any kind of refusal, Cory grabbed her best friend by the arm and dragged him - fully dragged him, with all of the weight in her tiny, five-foot-four body - to the pitiful square of open floor that countered for a dance floor in the bar. He’d recognized her scheme as soon as her coin had clinked into the machine, and he was as stiff as a board as she arranged the two of them in some semblance of a dancing position. It was awkward, and she had to elbow him like they were middle schoolers again to get him to cooperate with her, but she made it work right as the sweet sound of needle hitting vinyl filled her ears, and the outcome was unmistakable: it was Bowie, and it was  _ loud _ . 

She couldn’t tell whether Javi wanted to laugh or berate her as she dragged into something resembling dancing, their height difference putting an impediment on her ability to get him to loosen up for once. To her, this was perfect. Her best friend, decent beer, and David Bowie? She couldn’t ask for anything better. (Well, maybe for the beer to be a  _ little  _ better, but she knew the rule about a gift horse.) It felt like something was finally shifting back from years of being out of place - even if that meant getting grumbly, cranky Javi back. 

“Five years in the fuckin’ jungle,” he mumbled, “And I come back to this.” 

Cory shrugged.

“I had to do something to congratulate you.”

And when it came to ideas, she tended to agree with her favorite starman on the best way to go. 

_ Let’s dance! _

The music was loud in their ears as the song kicked into gear, blasting in through strategically placed speakers that seemed to inject Nile Rodgers’ strong guitar straight into Cory’s bones. She liked that it made the rest of the bar seem to fall away, with the noted exception of Steve hooting from across the room. It was, essentially, utter chaos, but in the twenty-some years she’d known him, this felt closer to their normal than any civilized phone conversation ever did. 

J avi’s dancing skills were pitiful - as were hers - and what her mind had intended as some grand gesture morphed quickly into the two of them chest to chest, spinning around in ridiculous circles while Cory mumble-sang words in her best friend’s ear, happy that he relaxed a tiny bit once the song got going. They probably looked a drunken fright to the rest of the bar, but Steve’s words (read: shouts) of encouragement were enough to keep them going, and she had no intention of letting Javi go now that she finally,  _ finally  _ had him back. She’d been waiting for the chance to do this for ages, and she wasn’t about to let it slip away from her. 

“Today’s supposed to be a good thing,” she murmured. She had to practically stand on her tiptoes to reach him, but it was worth it. “Relax.”

“I can’t exactly relax with everybody in this bar staring at me, now can I?”

The words were contradictory, but she could hear the teasing in Javi’s voice as he whispered his response in her ear. He squeezed her side where his hand was rested, and she rolled her eyes at him, despite the fact that he couldn’t see it. Having a deliberately difficult friend was fun sometimes, but now, she just wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand that he enjoy himself for once in his damn life. 

“And I can’t do this if I relax.”

He raised a free hand from her waist to grab her own from around his neck. She frowned. 

“Do what? Javi, I’m just trying to--”

Cory didn’t have enough time to even be confused about his response before his grip on her hand tightened and she found herself being spun like a dollar store top, in, under, and around Javi’s arms in an overwhelming pattern that nearly knocked her off her feet. She would’ve been lost to the sticky floor of the bar in an instant, if not for the firm grounding of her friend’s grip on her hand, warm even in the heat of the room. It felt like an anchor in an awfully stormy sea, and she was shocked to realize she’d even been on a boat in the first place. 

His hand landed on the small of her back when he pulled her back in, and she looked at him with eyes like craters as she regained her sense of the room. Javier Peña was not a showoff, not even when he was completely blasted. He was the one who stood by the sidelines, who looked on at her antics and busted her ass for smoking pot and definitely, definitely didn’t do anything even remotely close to _ that _ . He was kind, but he was quiet. She was the loud one, so where had this come from? 

Her answer came in the sigh that he gave her, after she’d raised an eyebrow at him like he’d just admitted to high treason. Something had shifted in his face, something moving in a direction she wasn’t equipped to follow. 

“Making up for being a terrible partner at prom.” 

He shrugged, the Javier version of a sympathetic reaction, and Cory’s heart did that tiny flip-flop it always did whenever he decided that being a hardass wasn’t worth his time. He was a sweetheart, under all that Kevlar and somberness and the terrible Burt Reynolds mustache. He had a heart, much as he tried to hide it away to protect himself, and Cory treasured the few moments she had when he’d take off that stupid DEA jacket and wear it on his sleeve for a bit.

She was still dizzy though.

“You’re unbelievable.” 

She tried to tamper down the smile that wanted to break across her face into some kind of a scowl, but it only succeeded in making her look exceedingly awkward - as if she didn’t feel somewhat like that already. What passed for a chuckle with Javier passed his lips as the music continued to blare on, and it nearly knocked her stone cold to the floor when he actually looked somewhat amused with her. 

“Says the woman making me dance to David Bowie in the middle of a dive bar,” he replied, his voice still betraying that smile in her ear. She grinned. 

“You know you love it.” 

He didn’t answer her, but his face softened in the same way it had before, back to that frustratingly unreadable look he’d given her. The pleasantness lingered in his expression, however, and that was more than enough for her as the song began to fade away into the typical din of the bar. Her best friend was home, with her, and that was all that mattered. 

“Welcome home, Javi,” she mumbled, resting her head against his shoulder. “We missed you.” 


	2. not enough cigarettes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javier Peña, poster boy for crippling internal guilt over having fun.

The wind outside the bar on Southlake was whipping enough to be deemed cold, a rare sight for Dallas in the middle of September. Usually, summer lasted well into Halloween for them, and nary a cool refreshing wind dared to blow its way through the city on a normal day. Dallas had a proper hold on eternal summer, close to Mexico and the equator as they were, so to feel such a wind only just after school had gone back in session was a surprise for all the patrons leaning on the wall out back, their cigarettes tiny, artificial fireflies in the dying light of the day.

And even though it made it damn near impossible to get his own cigarette lit, Javier appreciated the wind as it came, blowing as his only relief from the bright red burning currently flushing his skin. 

He’d ducked out of the bar as soon as he’d heard the jukebox scratch to a halt, claiming he’d gone too long listening to Cory’s stories and needed a smoke break, as much for himself as to give her some space to breathe between all the words she was throwing out like softball pitches. She was in rare form tonight, that light behind her eyes that said she was up to absolutely no good shining brighter than a spotlight on the Hollywood sign. He should’ve known better than to put she and Steve in a room together - with alcohol, to boot - and expect any less. They were motormouths, the both of them, and combining that with the fact that she hadn’t seen him in over a year created a specific brand of chaos that Javier hadn’t been entirely prepared for. 

He couldn’t quite sort out whether the sudden flush of his skin was simply embarrassment at being dragged in front of an entire bar, or something else entirely. 

Bodies came and went as he puffed his way through the cigarette, taking more time than he usually would to let the nicotine flush the burning sensation from his skin. They were there for the same reason as him, and he barely paid any mind to them as they slipped in and out like needles through embroidery cloth. That’s all they were - bodies satisfying a means to an end, so Javi barely noticed Steve slip outside amongst the comings and goings until a hand shot out in front of him. 

“Mind if I bum a light?”

His eyes drifted up from the smoldering tobacco hanging from his lips to meet his partner’s gaze. He shrugged. 

“Not like you haven’t before.” 

The tiny piece of red plastic hopped into Steve’s palm in a one-handed toss, and Javi’s eyes drifted back to the end of the smoke he was dangerously close to finishing. Not much longer and he’d have to make actual conversation. 

He heard Steve light up his own Marlboro more than he saw it, and he took his sweet time puffing on the end of the sad stump of a cigarette he was attempting to prolong. He’d gone through the rest of his pack in the Dallas airport, burning through smoke after smoke on the way through customs in an attempt to placate his nerves about seeing Cory again. Unfounded nerves, he was sure of that, but nerves nonetheless. His lungs hated him. As did the cigarette that finally burnt itself out, leaving Javi as exposed as a stripped cable.

“How have you not asked her out?” 

The words were a surprise to Javi as he stamped out the last of the mutinous cigarette’s carcass in the dying brown grass. So much so that he barely registered them as coming from Steve, much less being directed at him. 

“What?”

He glanced up at his partner - one of two people in the world who really, truly knew him - with his brow furrowed. He didn’t follow, and Steve frowned. 

“Cory.” 

Steve let the name hang in the air for a moment, watching as his usually stoic partner’s eyes quite literally lit up at the sound of it. It was subtle, but it still made him look like a kid who’d been let loose in a toy store with his mother’s wallet. Nothing ever got that kind of a reaction out of him. That was almost answer enough for him. 

“You were  _ dancing _ with her, dude.” If he hadn’t had a cigarette in his mouth, he might’ve choked out a laugh. “You’re obviously crazy about her. How have you not asked her out yet?”

The word “crazy” extinguished the flame that had been lit behind Javi’s eyes almost as soon as it had been ignited. The fleeting expression of hopefulness (happiness?) was gone, replaced by a scowl that Steve knew was too stern to just be a reaction to the chilling wind. He’d certainly seen it enough times. 

“Dancing doesn’t mean I’m in love with her,” he replied. His hands twitched without another cigarette to light, another wall to put up. “She’s my best friend. We’ve been doing it since we were kids.”

He said it like the statement was an obvious answer to the question. Steve wasn’t convinced. 

“So you know she doesn’t hate you. That’s a good start.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I got Connie’s number in a fuckin’ bar, man.”

It felt odd for Steve to have to lay something bare to Javi like he was explaining it to a kindergartner. Javi was smart - smarter than him, certainly, and definitely not blind when it came to women. What was it about Cory, he thought as he gestured with a cigarette-heavy hand towards the bar, that made this any different?

“You’ve got a twenty-something year head start on that. It’ll be easy.” 

A beat passed, and Javi’s shoulders sagged, like the mere suggestion that he make a move on someone he knew that well had placed heavy weights on them. He looked like he aged ten years in as many seconds. 

“She doesn’t think of us like that.” 

An eyebrow shot up Steve’s forehead.

“But you do,” he said, like it was a fact. And, since he had the evidence to back it up, he figured it was. Javi only grimaced. 

“I didn’t say that.” 

“You spent most of dinner staring at her.” 

“Because she never shuts up. Trust me, I’d know.” 

“Bullshit.” 

The word came out louder than Steve had intended, drawing the eyes of a few other smokers who’d given them their privacy by drifting towards the road. He didn’t exactly have the best track record for staying quiet while tipsy, and the fact that his partner - his closest friend, at that - was being so stubborn only made the challenge more difficult. 

And he knew what he’d seen. Javi had been a grouch about Cory’s embarrassing stories, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off her the entire time. He’d let her talk and talk and talk, and when she dragged him up in front of that entire bar and spun the two of them around like whirligigs, he looked…

Well, Steve had never seen that seen that look on his friend’s face, but he knew for certain that it was the same one that had been on his the day he and Connie had gotten engaged.

“Just ask her out, man.” Steve tempered the frustration in his voice into a fine piece of glass, biting back the sigh that threatened to escape his throat as he looked at Javi and his weight-of-the-world expression. “You don’t have to be fuckin’ Romeo. Take her to a movie or something. I’m sure she’d like it, and it can’t hurt to—” 

“She was there when I left my fiancee at the altar, Steve.”

The words stopped Steve dead in his tracks. 

Not exactly a revelation he’d been expecting. 

They stopped Javi too, frankly, as the both of them stopped their habitual shuffling in the grass to look at each other like a bomb had just been dropped. It had for him, at least, stripping away his skin and leaving him nothing but a searing pile of nerves as the words hung in the air. Words he said he’d never tell, but that seemed inevitable anyway. He didn’t know why Cory had lied about the suit. Steve knew about the broken engagement - hell, he was pretty sure Connie did too. It wasn’t really a secret. Secrets weren’t a thing people kept in the DEA. Not from their partners. Not unless you wanted to get hurt. 

“Not in the car,” he said. His voice sounded heavy as lead. “At the church. Got everyone off my ass before she even knew what I was doing. Even though she knew I probably deserved it.” 

The words seemed only to add to what was weighing him down. He was Atlas and Sisyphus and Prometheus, the minds of those who dared defy the nature of the world all rolled into one, the weight of knowledge pressing down on him, determined to turn him into nothing more than a flower pressing in the great book of the universe’s life. Forgotten until someone stumbles upon it years later, their only reaction a remark of beauty made in pity. These were memories he’d locked away, their skeleton key tossed in with the bones of the rest of his old life. He’d never meant to say them aloud. 

“I can’t do something like that to her.” He paused, only long enough to rake a hand down his face. “I can’t risk that.” 

“Who says you would?”

Steve’s voice bled through the haze of Javi’s self-pity, through the sensation of the cold wind whipping against his back that he was trying so hard to focus on to avoid spinning out like some kind of sad car accident. It was the voice of a friend, a voice that he could pick out the hills and valleys of without even having to look up. It was the voice of somebody who’d seen plenty of his insides bared clean like an autopsy, hopeful and brash and naive enough to brave jumping to a conclusion even if it meant falling on his ass in the mud. B

But this was quicksand, not mud, and Javi had already gotten a foot stuck in it without knowing.

“I’m just trying to keep her safe, Steve.” 

He sighed. He wished for another cigarette. He wished for an out. He wished for Steve to stop staring him down like he’d caught a virus and was going crazy. 

None of those things happened. 

“What if she’s safest with you?” 

His partner was completely serious, not an ounce of doubt trickling into his voice anywhere. Brother to brother, he had some kind of confidence in his friend that Javier would never completely understand. The words stung him almost as much as a slap to the face. 

The words might’ve been true, but it didn’t matter much as they bounced off Javi’s back as he spun around, seeing no other option but to return to the warmth of the bar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I ever expect to be writing Steve Murphy as the rational one in these stories? Absolutely not. But Javi has a skull as thick as a brick, and somebody's got to shake some sense into him.
> 
> (Am I projecting through Steve so I don't keep yelling "JUST TELL HER YOU LOVE HER" at my own stories while writing? Perhaps. Writing is weird, y'all.)


End file.
